Other people saying things, Zimmerman verdict edition

I don't have any brilliant insights on the George Zimmerman verdict. Some say the story's about racism; others say it's about guns; others say it's about Florida's horrible self-defense laws. Pretty sure it's all of the above. Each part of this episode—even just the stuff we know for sure—is deeply troubling, from the fact that Zimmerman saw Trayvon Martin as a threat to his vigilante response to the way his legal deadly weapon upped the ante to the fact that holding him guiltless is a plausible interpretation of Florida law.

"What we do know is that one night an unarmed teenager with no history of violence walked home from the store after buying some candy. What we know is that a stranger with a gun, expressing an immediate hostility that’s clear from the gunman’s own recorded words, and despite later claims of being 'terrified' and admonitions by a police dispatcher not to get out of his car and follow the boy, got out of his car and followed the boy. We know that five minutes later the armed man shot the unarmed boy to death."

"There’s a reason George Zimmerman felt confident enough to confront Trayvon Martin and tell police that he feared for his life. In the America we’ve constructed, blacks are like the minions in a bad action movie. They’re both disposable and dangerous."

"It’s not against any rules to ask a white woman if the black man in the car with her is attacking her. It’s not against any rules to humiliate someone in a darkened parking lot in front of the person they love."

"We are tired of hearing that race is a conversation for another day. We are tired of pretending that 'reasonable doubt' is not, in every sense of the word, colored."